DOCUMENTING the UNDOCUMENTED LIFE NARRATIVES of UNAUTHORIZED IMMIGRANTS Although Arizona's Now-Notorious Anti-Immigration Bill

DOCUMENTING THE UNDOCUMENTED: LIFE NARRATIVES OF UNAUTHORIZED IMMIGRANTS MARTA CAMINERO-SANTANGELO Although Arizona’s now-notorious anti-immigration bill SB 1070 and the plethora of copycat legislation bills in several other states,1 as well as the re- cent failures to pass any form of the DREAM Act at a national level,2 have kept a spotlight on issues of undocumented immigration in national debates, the voices of the undocumented themselves have onlyly begun to register in this scene.3 Indeed, it is arguable that there is no population more silenced in the face of debates that most directly affect them than the undocumented. As journalist David Bacon has observed in Illegal People, “Those who live with globalization’s consequences are not at the table, and their voices are gener- ally excluded” (viii). In his introduction to Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, editor Peter Orner echoes these concerns: “We hear a lot about these people in the media. We hear they are responsible for crime. We hear they take our jobs, our benefi ts. We hear they refuse to speak Eng- lish. But how often do we hear from them?” (7). To speak and be heard, in ways that will not immediately invite the most serious of repercussions (e.g., detention and deportation), is a challenge that unauthorized immigrants face in ways that other populations with a direct stake in US legislative battles do not. Yet, personal stories—oral history, life writing, “witness” testimony— play an important, perhaps even a vital role in advocacy and human rights struggles, as a body of scholarship of the last decade suggests (e.g., Schaffer and Smith; Dawes; Nance; Beverley). Thus the question of how undocumented stories might participate in the public sphere where immigration policy and legislation are debated becomes increasingly urgent. In this essay, I consider Orner’s oral history collection Underground America, a rhetorically fascinating, multi-voiced text that purports to make Biography 35.3 (Summer 2012) © Biographical Research Center 03Caminero.indd 449 11/29/12 10:49 AM 450 Biography 35.3 (Summer 2012) hearable the voices of the undocumented and to insert these voices into the landscape of political debate. Among published accounts by undocumented immigrants, Underground America is unprecedented in its scope (it includes accounts by twenty-four immigrants of various national origins), its explicit “human rights” agenda, and its high profi le and reach—published by Mc- Sweeney’s as part of the Voice of Witness series founded and edited by human rights scholar Lola Vollen and by Dave Eggers, a prominent author whose other narratives of human rights crisis include What is the What (about Southern Sudan and the “Lost Boys”) and Zeitoun (about civil rights in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina). Luis Alberto Urrea, a prominent Mexican- American author of fi ction and non-fi ction, including several texts dealing with the border region, penned the Foreword. The collection has been re- viewed by the likes of NPR and Publishers Weekly.4 Thus, more than any other published work to date, Underground America attempts a public hearing by mainstream audiences of the personal stories of the undocumented. In so doing, the collection takes up a Latin American tradition known as “testimonio,” referring to texts of life history meant to call attention, via the personal (but representative) story, to a situation of grave humanitarian crisis, and to charge Western readerships with the ethical responsibility of respond- ing to that crisis. Testimonio has always faced the problem of constructing a sense of connection across the boundaries of national identity, such that readers would come to feel a sense of obligation and responsibility for what was happening “elsewhere.” But this problem takes on new and complicat- ed dimensions when the elsewhere is here—when the national “others” who are speaking are within the political boundaries of the intended readership’s nation-state, yet regarded as not belonging there.5 While the potential power of testimonio resides in the ability of the personal story to construct empathy and identifi cation in readers—and therefore testimonio needs insistently to anticipate the response of its imagined readership and to craft narrative strategies that will elicit the desired sense of ethical responsibility (see Nance, especially 50–59, 72–79)—the peculiar status of the undocumented as per- ceived interlopers in the “nation” creates particular obstacles to the soliciting of readerly empathy. Mae Ngai has prominently labeled undocumented immigrants “impossible subjects,” a nomenclature which signals, precisely, their positioning as categorical entities literally without status—as “non-entities”—within the logic of the nation-state. In an extension of this logic, Monisha Das Gupta terms immigrant activists “‘unruly’ in view of their struggle for rights in the face of their formal/legal and popular codifi cation as noncitizens”; the activists “provoke us to question the monopoly of citizenship on rights” (4). The 03Caminero.indd 450 11/29/12 10:49 AM Caminero-Santangelo, Documenting the Undocumented 451 undocumented immigrants whose stories are told in Underground America similarly are challenging the “monopoly of citizenship on rights” and insisting on alternative notions of rights that do not stem from codifi ed notions of national membership. Nonetheless, the pressure exerted on the text as a whole by the circulation of vitriolic rhetoric about so-called “illegal” immigrants results in an ambivalent product in which reliance on human rights rhetoric coexists (sometimes uneasily) with notions of rights precisely based on national membership, and which ends up challenging not so much the idea that rights stem from national belonging as the idea that the undocumented narrators must be excluded from such notions of national belonging. The narrative of nation is rewritten, then, but notions of the rootedness of rights in nation are precariously maintained. The particular dilemma faced by the compilers and narrators of Underground America concerns how to solicit recognition and identifi cation for the undocumented based upon claims of a common humanity, when such claims are inherently circumscribed by the limits placed on national belonging. As I will discuss shortly, concepts of human rights have always been linked with notions of nation, even as they seemed overtly intended to stretch the limits of “rights” beyond national boundaries. Discourses of human rights and of national belonging have a fundamentally fraught relationship, relying on each other even as they seem to pull in opposite directions. Underground America displays a profound awareness of the imbrication of “human rights” with the construction of nationhood, and accordingly constructs an argu- ment in which the undocumented should be “recognized” as fellow human beings precisely because they are part and parcel of a national narrative. The collection advances the premise that the immigrants it represents are already part of the “American nation,” not only physically but in the more profound sense of collective belonging and participation in a national project; and that their claim to human rights ought therefore to be recognized on the grounds of national belonging. The text, that is, appears strategically shaped to anticipate and counter the unhearability of unauthorized immigrants for US citizens and the potential inability of the latter to “recognize” the former as human beings with rights, precisely because they are “impossible subjects,” inside and yet outside the boundaries of the nation-state. As I will suggest in the fi nal portion of the essay, to the degree that the rhetorical capacity of tes- timonios to invite identifi cation with the subaltern narrator is ultimately lim- ited, we might need to consider the possibility of an ethics of responsibility that depends less entirely on identifi cation and empathy, and that requires, instead, “recognition” of one’s own participation in a larger system of privi- leges and inequalities. 03Caminero.indd 451 11/29/12 10:49 AM 452 Biography 35.3 (Summer 2012) NON-CITIZENS, NATION, AND VOICE: THE QUESTION OF SUBALTERN SPEECH In a substantial revision of her earlier work on public sphere theory, Nancy Fraser has recently argued that traditional formulations of the public sphere— that metaphorical space in which matters of the social and political good are debated and “public opinion” is derived—have invariably taken for granted that “citizenship set the legitimate bounds of inclusion [in public delibera- tions], effectively equating those affected with the members of an established polity” (94). The non-citizen has no voice recognizable in the public sphere, as currently conceived, to participate in arguments about matters most per- tinent to his or her own well-being, such as immigration policy and enforce- ment, possible routes to legal status, and so on (4–5). Peter Nyers turns his attention to the “acts of agency” involved when non-citizens do, in fact, insert their voices into debates directly impacting them and thus challenge their exclusion from a particular nation-state; he terms such practices “abject cosmopolitanism” (415, 417). In insisting upon their “right” to speak on issues directly affecting them, undocumented migrants refuse their construction as “abject” by dominant discourses that relegate them to the position of silenced other, and in effect reimagine the very terms of “citizenship” and “nation.” We can understand Underground America as just such a manifestation of “abject cosmopolitanism” on the part of the undocumented, a refusal to accept the terms of “nation” which consign them to silence. But such an understanding must come with qualifi ers, as Nyers suggests through his probing questions: “Can the endangered speak for themselves? . For their agency to be recognized as legitimate and heard as political, does it require mediation from other citizen groups?” (415). We cannot assume that because the abject refuse their abjection they are therefore “speaking for themselves” in some pure form.

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